How to minimize SPAM in your CBPref.com Inbox
By Jason K. Serafin
As I travel through our Coldwell Banker Preferred branch offices, I hear many agents ask me the same question
over and over: “What can we do to eliminate spam?”
Our sales associates claim to receive so many spam or junk emails to their cbpref.com business email address
daily. Other agents say the same occurs with their personal email accounts such as Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, etc.
The answer is, ultimately, there's no way for you, me, or anyone to completely eliminate spam.
The real questions are: How do you deal with spam, when you get it so that it's merely a minor annoyance
rather than an overwhelming chore, and how do you avoid spam, or at least minimize it, in the first place?
You Can't Stop Spam
The bottom line is that anyone can send you email, period.
That's good in that anyone who knows you and your email address can communicate with you via email.
It's also bad, since anyone who knows your email address can send you junk email trying to sell you stuff or
fool you into handing over your private information when you shouldn't. Eventually all email addresses will
receive spam.
Blocking Doesn't Always Work
On the surface email blocking or banning seems like the perfect solution. But if you look deeper, spammers can
work around that option almost instantly.
Blocking simply tells your email provider or email program "whenever you get email from this email address,
discard it immediately".
So why doesn't that work? Because spammers change their email address too often. In most cases, most
spammers never send from the same email address more than once. This makes it difficult to block individual
email addresses.
But even worse, spammers fake the email address. They can make a spam message look like it comes from one
of your friends or acquaintances. If you ban or block one of those, then that friend or acquaintance can no
longer send you email.
For this and other reasons, blocking usually isn’t a viable approach any more.
Spam Filters Make Life Bearable
What does work are good spam filters.
Spam filters work by looking not just at where email comes from, but the nitty-gritty technical details of the
email; what it's about, what it says and how it says, and how many other people are getting that same email
message. If it looks like spam, then the email is simply placed in your spam or junk mail folder instead of your
inbox.
On average, users receive 100 spam emails or more per day. But less than 10, maybe even less than 5, actually
show up in your cbpref.com business email inbox thanks to Barracuda SPAM filtering for Coldwell Banker
Preferred agents.
If you have 100+ spam emails arriving in your inbox every day, I would guess you're not protected by a spam
filter at all.
How to access Barracuda – The Quarantine Site for CBPref.com
SPAM
Everyone who has a cbpref.com email address automatically has their own SPAM filtering system called
Barracuda. 1. To access your Barracuda SPAM folder, go to https://quarantine.cbpref.com
a. Your user name = your cbpref.com email address
b. Your password is the same as your current cbpref.com email password and wireless password
2. If you have issues logging in, please feel free to call the NRT helpdesk at 1-877-NRT-HELP
After you login, you should see a screen similar to below that shows your Quarantine Inbox folder and
all mail that has been sent to your account but has been quarantined by the system (not delivered to your
Mailbox).
Within this screen you can release quarantine messages that have been marked as spam and add email
addresses to the Whitelist for your account. The first section is the search area, if you do not see the
email you were looking to release to your mailbox, you can search for the specific message using one of
the 3 search criteria: (“From” contains, Subject contains and Message contains).
For example: If you are looking for a “hotmail.com” address, choose “From contains” from the drop down
Filter menu and type in “hotmail.com” in the Pattern field. Please remember to click on the “Apply Filter”
button to view your search criteria. You can add a check mark in the box to the left of the message and clicked
deliver to send the message to your Inbox.
PLEASE NOTE: You can also click the Whitelist button if you want to avoid the email from being quarantined
the next time.
If you click the “Preferences Tab” you can Whitelist all your approved email address and Blacklist all
spam email addresses as needed.
Similarly, if you're using an email program such as Outlook, Windows Mail or dozens of others, take the time
to learn and understand its spam filtering features. Some email programs have next to no filtering, but many
have the same type of "learning" spam filter that the web sites do, albeit on a smaller scale.
Challenge/Response
I have to start out by saying that I really dislike challenge/response spam blockers.
These are systems where the first time you send someone a message you get an automated response that
includes some hoop you need to jump through to prove you're human and not a spammer. Typically it involves
filling out a CAPTCHA (distorted letters test) or something similar.
Essentially you're placing the burden of blocking spam on all the people sending you email. At the same time
you're also very likely to begin missing mail you actually want, such as automated confirmation of your online
purchases or your bank statements. Almost all automated systems will not fill out the CAPTCHA requirements
and therefore, you will not receive legitimate email.
Like I said, I really don't like this approach.
However, I will include it here as a last resort for the truly overwhelmed agents as a last resort.
One of the most common and reputable services would be Spam Arrest.
Preventing or minimizing Spam in the First Place
There is no way to really stop spam, only deal with it in a way that makes it less of an issue when you get it.
Similarly there's no way to prevent it from starting. Eventually all email address will get spam. Eventually!
What you can do is avoid “asking” for spam. Many people unknowingly ask for spam in various ways:
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Giving your email address to the wrong person, company or agency. This is actually one reason
many people have more than one email address, or create one-time or "throw-away" email addresses.
Many companies will share their email lists with others, or even sell the list of their customer's email
addresses. Reputable companies do not, so keep shopping at Amazon and the like, but be careful when
dealing with a company you've never dealt with before. Consider creating and using a different email
address for this purpose.
Responding to or acting on spam. Replying to any form of spam is really just a signal to the spammers
that they have a real, live person at this email address, and that they should send you more spam. Lots
more spam. Even if you ask them to unsubscribe you. Similarly, acting on spam (such as clicking on
spammer's link, or - horrors! - purchasing a product through spam) also tells spammers "we got a live
one!”
Enabling pictures on spam. The reason that pictures are disabled by default on most spam-filtered
email is that the mere act of accessing an image so that it can be displayed can tell a spammer they have
a real email address. Expect more spam.
Posting an email address publicly. If your email address is visible on a web page somewhere that
anyone can get to, then "anyone" includes spammers. They have been known to harvest email addresses
from web pages on the assumption that they are more likely to be real, active email addresses than
simply guessing randomly (which they also do).
The list actually goes on. What's worse is it includes items that are not in your control:
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When you send a joke, photo, urban legend, rant or what-have-you to a friend, and they then forward it
on without removing your email address from the forward, your email address is now "in the wild".
Worse, when a friend sends you an email like that and does so by putting you and 200 other people on
the "To:" or "Cc:" line, they've just advertised your email address to everyone else that got that email.
And when they forward it without trimming ... your email address makes it out to potentially hundreds
or thousands of people you don't know. And some of those people are spammers.
There's literally nothing you can do, except perhaps admonish your friends not to do that - but by then it's too
late.
That's why I say that sooner or later every email address will get spam.